architecture in singapore displays a range of influences and styles from different places and periods. this includes vernacular malay houses as well as colonial civic and commercial architecture in european neoclassical, gothic, palladian and renaissance styles.

group8asia is an architecture practice led by manuel der hagopian and grégoire du pasquier. the swiss-owned company is based in geneva, singapore and hanoi, and has completed a range of projects across southeast asia.

group8asia + aedas completes punggol waterway terraces in singapore

looking to the future whilst looking back to the past, the ‘punggol waterway terraces’ by group8asia + aedas form a blueprint for 21st-century sustainable mass housing and mark a return to singapore’s original ethos of community pride and identity. the original SIT public housing blocks were tropical adaptations of contemporary clean-lined modernism. as they were designed well before the advent of air conditioning, the apartments required cross-ventilation, they were shaded by overhangs and were orientated to avoid the heat of the afternoon sun. when the first large-scale HDB blocks were built in queenstown in the early 1970s, that ‘tropical-necessity modernist-design’ architectural hybrid symbolised a newly independent singapore.

as singapore grew more affluent and as global architectural fashions changed, those heroic tropical-modernist forms were to quietly disappear. they were replaced by an architecture that itched to assert singapore’s worldliness, but the designs became increasingly generic, many of the developments were implicitly anti-social,and the structures were unsustainably non-tropical. however, in the face of global warming and the loss of community identity, the pendulum has swung back to the principles and the spirit of tropical-modernist design, especially in the field of public housing.

the sheer mass and the fundamental design elements of the waterway terraces are not hidden, they instead are presented to the public and the residents as an unequivocal response to the 21st-century requirements for a sustainable, yet enjoyable, high-density urban lifestyle. a matrix of planning strategies provides passive climatic control – cross ventilation and shading from the sun – whilst maximising the orientation of the apartments towards the waterway that bisects the site.

set upon linked hexagonal plans, the ‘arms’ of the blocks step down to the waterway as terraces, so all the residents have a direct experiential connection with the landscape and with their neighbourhood. the apartments are shielded from the heat and the rain by undulating ribbons of ‘juliet’ balconies, which perform as decorative sun-shading devices. a continuous no-dead-end corridor runs the length of every floor in each of the two sectors, and by virtue of an ingenious planning maneuver, the double-loaded corridors actually facilitate cross-ventilation and vertical cooling, instead of blocking the airflow to the apartments.

due to the hexagonal block plans, three corridors are angled at 120 degrees from the lift cores to serve apartments grouped in threes. each apartment is directly ventilated by the lift core breeze ways and by voids inserted between the groupings. the fundamental principles of passive tropical design have been inventively re-calibrated and then expressed at a monumental scale, whilst the contextually-attuned planning and massing have reintroduced a sense of communal identity at a human scale. ‘waterway terraces’ is a genuine precursor to the zero-energy mass housing that will be essential for the continued growth of asia’s cities.

LOG IN

designboom's comment policy guidelines generally speaking, if we publish something, it's because we're genuinely interested in the subject. we hope you'll share this interest and if you know even more about it, please share! our goal in the discussion threads is to have good conversation and we prefer constructive opinions. we and our readers have fun with entertaining ones. designboom welcomes alerts about typos, incorrect names, and the like. the correction is at the discretion of the post editor and may not happen immediately.

what if you disagree with what we or another commenter has to say? let's hear it! but please understand that offensive, inappropriate, or just plain annoying comments may be deleted or shortened.

- please do not make racist, sexist, anti-semitic, homophobic or otherwise offensive comments. - please don't personally insult the writers or your fellow commenters. - please avoid using offensive words, replacing a few letters with asterisks is not a valid workaround. - please don't include your website or e-mail address in your comments for the purpose of self-promotion. - please respect jury verdicts and do not discuss offensively on the competition results (there is only one fist prize, and designboom usually asks renown professionals to help us to promote talent. in addition to the awarded designs, we do feel that almost all deserve our attention, that is why we publish the best 100-200 entries too.)

a link is allowed in comments as long as they add value in the form of information, images, humor, etc. (links to the front page of your personal blog or website are not okay). unwelcome links (to commercial products or services of others, offensive material etc. ) will be redacted. and, ... yes, spam gets banned. no, we do not post fake comments.

a diverse digital database that acts as a valuable guide in gaining insight and information about a product directly from the manufacturer, and serves as a rich reference point in developing a project or scheme.